Re: 8.2 fails suddenly to boot - /etc/rc issues

    Date:        Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:35:12 +0100
    From:        Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]>
    Message-ID:  <[email protected]>

  | Despite the warnings and the fact I get asked for the shell path, a 
  | reboot suceeds in a mixed-mode, not properly multi-user (because no 
  | login) but also with a read-write filesystem.

That's strange, but without actually seeing what is happening, it is
hard to diagnose.

  | no, I did not change rc.subr

Good.   Most people don't - it is one of the trickier parts of
the system.

  | Perhaps some files corrupted in my filesystem?

That's certainly a possibility - and could be caused by lots of
thing, anything from a bug, to failing disk, RAM problems, or even
power fluctuations.

  | extract ./etc/rc.subr
  | and comare it to my local one. It looks full of differences!

Differences as in some parts the same, but with changes, but still
looking like sh code, or differences more like "these two things are
nothing alike at all"?

  | The file looks recently modified:
  | -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  24819 Mar  9 21:21 /etc/rc.subr
  | -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    190 Mar  9 21:21 /etc/rc.conf.example

  | but I did not touch it intentionally. I wonder if pkg_rollng-replace 
  | would change it?

Don't use it, so don't know for sure, but it shouldn't - almost everything
in pkgsrc is supposed to be confined to within /usr/pkg (or wherever you
put it).

  | The only remaining issue I have now is, even after a clean boot:
  |
  | random_seed: /var/db/entropy-file: Not present

If your system is actually collecting randomness, that file should be
created when you do a shutdown (contains the state of the world - relating
to the system's randomness) at that point, so it can continue from there
after a reboot.   That's the only time it gets created, unless you do it
manually.

  | The system look salvaged at a first check, but I really wonder what 
  | happened...

The contents of the broken rc.subr file might give some clues.

  | on 9.2 I get a failure in pcre with ICE.

That part I can't help with.

kre